YouTube face obscurer

To help protect dissidents using YouTube it has made available a new tool allowing people to obscure faces within videos uploaded onto its platform.

“Visual anonymity in video allows people to share personal footage more widely and to speak out when they otherwise may not,” Amanda Conway, a YouTube policy associate, wrote in a statement about the new tool. She pointed out that “human rights footage, in particular, opens up new risks to the people posting videos and to those filmed.”

YouTube said that the technology could be used for happier situations, too. Its statement points out that it could be used before sharing “the winning point in your 8-year-old’s basketball game” so that the child’s face would not be broadcast to the world.